09 - Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart

Our Southern Highlanders is a captivating memoir by Horace Kephart, a Pennsylvania-born writer and librarian, who shares his profound experiences and cultural insights from his time in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Narrated by Meredith Womac Cook, this work offers a unique glimpse into a bygone era, though readers should be aware that it contains some offensive language and overt racism reflective of its time and setting.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section nine of Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Keppart. This
LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Outlander and
the Native. Among the many letters had come to me
from men who think of touring or camping in highland Dixie,
there are few but ask how are strangers treated? This

(00:23):
question natural and prudent, though it be never fails to
make me smile, for I know so well the thoughts
that lie back of it. Suppose one should blunder innocently
upon a moonshine? Still, what would happen if a few
were raging in the land? How would a stranger fare?
If one goes alone into the mountains? Does he run

(00:44):
any risk of being robbed? Before I left the tame
West and came into this wild East, I would have
asked a few questions myself if I had known any
one to answer them. As it was, I turned up
rather abruptly in a backward settlement where the furner was
more than a nine days wonder. I bore no credentials,

(01:05):
and it was quite as well if I had presented
a letter from some clergyman or from the President of
the United States, it would have been just what I
was myself a curiosity, as when the puppy discovered some
weird and marvelous new bug. Everyone greeted me politely, but
with unfeigned interest. I was welcome to stop in bed

(01:28):
wherever I went. Moonshiners and manslayers were as affable as
common folks. I dwelt alone for a long time, first
in open camp, afterwards in a secluded hut. Then I
boarded with a native family. Often I left my belongings
to look out for themselves, whilst I went away on
expeditions of days or weeks at a time. And nobody

(01:51):
ever stole from me so much as a fishhook or
a brass cartridge. So in their retrospect, I smile. Does
this mean then that Poe's characterization of the mountaineers is
out of date? Not at all. They are the same
fierce and uncouth race of men today that they were
in his time. Homicide is so prevalent in the districts

(02:14):
that I personally am acquainted with that nearly every adult
citizen has been directly interested in some murder case, either
as principal officer, witness, kinsman, or friend. This gruesome subject
I shall treat elsewhere in detail. It is introduced here
only to emphasize a fact pertinent to the present topic,

(02:36):
namely that the private wars of the Highlanders are limited
to their own people. In our corner of North Carolina,
no traveler from the outside has ever been a victim,
nor do I know of any such case in the
whole Appalachian region. And here is another significant fact as
regards personal property. I do not know any race in

(02:57):
the world that is more honest than our backwoodsmen of
the southern Mountains. As soon as you leave the railroad,
you enter a land where sneak these are rare, and
burglars almost unheard of. In my own county and all
those adjoining it, there has been only one case of
highway robbery, and only one of murder for money, so

(03:17):
far as I can learn, for the past forty years.
The Mountain coat of conduct is a curious mixture of
savagery and civility. One man will kill another over a
pig or a panel of fence, not for the property's sake,
but because of hot words ensuing, and he will come
clear in court because every fellow in the jury feels

(03:38):
he would have done the same thing himself under similar provocation.
Yet these very men, vengeful and cruel though they are,
regard hospitality as a sacred duty toward wayfarers of any degree,
and the bare idea of stealing from a stranger would
excite their instant loathing or white hot scorn. Anyone of

(03:59):
tact and common sense can go as he pleases through
the darkest corner of Appalachia without being molested. Tact, however,
implies the will and the insight to put yourself truly
in the other man's place. Imagine yourself, born, bred, circumstanced
like him. It implies also the courtesy of doing as

(04:20):
you would be done by if you were in that
fellow's shoes. No arrogance, no condescension, but man to man
on a footing of equal manliness. And there are manners
in the rudest community customs and rules of conduct that
it is well to learn before one goes far afield.
For example, when you stop at a mountain cabin, if

(04:43):
no dogs sound an alarm, do not walk up to
the door and knock. You are expected to call out
hello until someone comes to inspect you. None but the
most intimate neighbors neglect this usage, and there is mighty
good reason back of it. In the land where the
path w one door may be a war path. If

(05:03):
you are armed as a hunter, do not fail to
remove the cartridges from the gun in your host's presence
before you set foot on his porch. Then give him
the weapon, or stand it in a corner, or hang
it up in plain view. Even our sheriff, when he
stopped with us, would lay his revolver on the mantelshelf
and leave it there until he went his way. If

(05:26):
you think a moment, you can see the courtesy of
such an act. It proves that the gas puts implicit
trust in the honor of his host and in his
ability to protect all within his house. There has never
been a case in which such trust was violated. I
knew a traveler who spending the night in a one
room cabin was fool enough. I can use no milder

(05:48):
term to thrust a loaded revolver under his pillow. When
he went to bed in the morning, his weapon was
still there, but empty, and its cartridges lay conspicuously on
a table across the room. Nobody said a word about
the incident. The hint was left to soak in the
only real danger that one may encounter from the native people,

(06:10):
so long as he behaves himself, is when he comes
upon a man who is wild with liquor and cannot
sidestep him, and such case give him the glad word
and move on at once. I have had a drunken
ball hooter log roller from the lumber camps fire five
shots around my head as a food deurgeois, and then

(06:32):
stand tantalizingly with hammer cocked over the sixth cartridge to
see what I would do about it. As a chance,
I did not mind his fireworks, for my head was
a swim with the rising fever of a riscapaless, and
I had come dragging my heels many and irk mile
down from the mountains to find a doctor. So I

(06:53):
merely smiled at the fellow and asked if he was
having a good time. He grinned sheepishly and let me
pass on high. The chief drawback to travel in this region,
aside from the roads, is not the character of the people,
but the quality of bed and board. Of course, there
are good hotels at most of the summer resorts, but

(07:14):
these are few and scattering at present. From a territory
so immense In most regions where there is noble scenery,
unspoiled forest, and good fishing, the accommodations are extremely rude.
Many of the village ins are dirty, and their tables
a shock and a despair to the hungry pilgrim. There

(07:34):
are blessed exceptions, to be sure, But on the other hand,
the travelers sometimes to encounter a cuisine that is neither
edible nor speakable, and will be shown a bed wherein
it needs no sherlock homes to detect that the previous
biped retired with his boots on, or at least with
much realty attached to his person. Such places often are

(07:56):
like that unpronounceable town of Russia, of which Parago said,
the bugs are the most companionable creatures in it, and
they are the cleanest. If one be of the same
mind as a plain spoken doctor Samuel Johnson that the
finest landscape in the world is not worth a dam
without a cozy in in the foreground, he should keep

(08:18):
to the stock showplaces of our highlands, or seek other playgrounds.
By far, the most comfortable way to say in the
back country at present is in a camp of one's own,
where he can keep things tidy and have food to
suit him. If you be though of stout stomach and
wishful to get true insight into the mountain ways and character,

(08:40):
you can find some sort of boarding place almost anywhere.
In such case, go first to the Sheriff of the county,
in person, not by letter. This officer is a walking
bureau of information and dispenses it freely to any stranger.
He knows almost every man in the county, his character
and his circumstance. He may be depended upon to direct

(09:02):
her to the best stopping places, and we'll tell you
how to get hunting and fishing privileges, and will recommend
a good packer or teamster if such help is wanted.
Along the railways and Maine County roads, the farmer show
a well justified mistrust about admitting company for the night.
But in the back districts the latch string generally is

(09:25):
out to all comers. If Euans can stand what Willians
has here, I'll come right in and set you a cheer.
If the man of the house has misgivings as to
the state of the larder, he will say, I'll ask
the women, can't she get you a bite? Seldom does
the wife demur, though sometimes her patience is sorely tried.

(09:49):
A stranger whose cock boots betrayed his calling, stopped at
Uncle Mark's to inquire, can I get to stay all night?
And Aunt Nance, peeping through a crack, warned her man in
a whisper. Them loggers just lous us up folks as
houses we're at, Mark answered the lumberjack. We don't generally

(10:09):
follow taking in strangers. Jack glanced significantly at the lowering
clouds and grunted, Ah, looks like I could stand hitched
all night. This was too much for Mark. Well, he exclaimed,
maybe Willans can find you a palette. I'll try to
enjoy you somehow, which being interpreted, means I'll entertain you

(10:32):
as best I can. The hospitality of the backwoods knows
no bounds short of sickness in the family or downright destitution.
Travelers often innostantly impose on poor people, and even criticize
the scanty fare when they may be getting a lion's
share of the last loaf in the house, and few

(10:53):
of them realize the actual cost of entertaining company in
a home that is long mountain miles from any market.
Fancy yourself making a twenty mile round trip over awful roads,
to carry a sack of flour on your shoulder and
a can of oil in your hand, and figure what
the transportation is worth. Once, when I was trying to

(11:14):
shortcut through the forest by following vague directions, I swerved
to the wrong trail. Sunset found me on the summit
of an unfamiliar mountain, with cold rain setting in and
below me lay the impenetrable laurel of Huggin's Hell. I
turned back to the head of the nearest water course, and,
not knowing whither it led, bought my way through thicket

(11:36):
and darkness to the nearest house and asked for lodging.
The man was just coming in from work. He betrayed
some anxiety, but admitted me with grave politeness. Then he
departed on an errand, leaving his wife to hear the
story of my wanderings. I was eager for supper, but
Madame made no move toward the kitchen. An hour passed,

(11:59):
a little child whimpered with hunger. The mother, flushing, soothed
it on her breast. Was well on in the night
when her husband returned, bearing a little poke of corn
meal then the woman flew to her poost. Soon we
had hot bread, three or four slices of pork, and
black coffee, unsweetened, all there was in the house. It

(12:22):
developed that when I arrived there was barely enough meal
for the family's supper and breakfast. My host had to
shell some corn, go in almost pitch darkness without a lantern,
to a tubmill far down the branch, wait while it
ground out a few spoonfuls to the minute, and bring
the meal back next morning. When I offered to pay

(12:43):
for my entertainment, he waved it aside. I never took
money from company, he said, And this ain't no time
to begin laughing. I slipped some silver into the hand
of the eldest child. This is not pay it's a present.
The girl was odd into speechlessness at sight of money
of her own, and the parents did not know how

(13:06):
to thank me for her, but bade me stay on, stranger.
Poor folks has a poor way. But you're welcome to
what we got. This incident is a little out of
the common nowadays, but it is typical of what was
customary until lumbering and other industrial works began to invade
the Solitudes. Today it is a rule to charge twenty

(13:28):
five cents a meal, and the same for lodging, regardless
of what the fair and the bed may be. When
you think of it, this is right for the poorer folks.
Is the harder it is to get things. The mountaineers
always are eager for news in the drab and out
of their shut in lives. The coming of an unknown

(13:49):
traveler is an event that will set the whole neighborhood gossiping.
Every word and action of his will be discussed for
weeks after he has gone his way. This, of course,
is a trade of rural people everywhere, but imagine, if
you can, how it may be intensified where there are
no newspapers, few visitors, and where the average man gets

(14:10):
maybe two or three letters a year. Riding up a
branch road, you come upon a white bearded patriarch who
hails you with the wave of the hand stranger meaning
no harm. Where are you, Gwyn? You tell him what
did you say your name was? You had not mentioned it,
but you do so. Now what might you ones follow

(14:33):
for a living? It is wise to humor the old
man and tell him, frankly, what is your business? Up
this way? Off? Branch. Half a mile further, you aspire
a girl coming toward you. She stops like a startled fawn,
wide eyed with amazement. Then at a bound she dodges
into a thicket, doubles on her course, and runs back

(14:54):
as fast as her nimblebar legs can carry her to
report that somebody's at the next house, stopping for a
drink of water. You chat a few moments high up
the opposite hill as a half hidden cabin from which
keen eyes scrutinize your every move, and a woman cries
to her boy run kit down to medersas and asks

(15:19):
who is he. As you approach a crossroads store, every
idler pricks up to instant attention. Your presence is detected
from every neighboring cabin and cornfield. Long John quits his plowing,
Red John drops his axe, Sick John, whose dollars ailing
to hear him tell, pops out of bed and lie

(15:42):
in John whose mouth ain't no prayer book if it
does open, and shit grabs his hat with I just
got to know who that fella is. Then all John's
to send their several paths to congregate at the store
and estimate the stranger as though he were so many
board feet of lumber in the tree, or so many

(16:03):
pounds of beef on the hoof. In every settlement there
is somebody who makes a pleasure of gathering and spreading
news such a one. We had a happy, gold lucky
fellow from whom they said, you can hear the news
jingling afore he comes within gunshot. It amused me to
record the many ways he had of announcing his mission

(16:25):
by indirection. Here's the list. I'm just broken about. Yes,
I'm just coutering around. I'm santering about. Oh, I'm just
projecting around, just trafficking about. No, I ain't working none,
just sputting around me. I'm just shackling around. Yeah, lah,

(16:51):
I'm just loafering about. And yet one hears that our
mountaineers have a limited vocabulary. Although this is no place
to discussed the mountain dialect, I must explain that to
brogue means to go about in brogues brogans. Nowadays, a
couter is a box tortoise, and the noun is turned

(17:11):
into a verb with an ease characteristic of the mountaineers.
Spudding around means toddling or jolting along to shummock. Also
shammock is to shuffle about idly, nosing into things as
a bear does when there's nothing serious in view, and
shackling around pictures a shacklely, loose jointed way of walking,

(17:34):
expressive of the idle vagabond. A stranger takes the mountaineers
for simple characters that can be gauged at a glance.
This illusion, for it is an illusion, comes from the
childlike directness with which they ask the most intimate questions
about himself, from the genuine goodwill which which they admit
to him, to their homes, and from the stark openness

(17:58):
of their domestic affairs and houses is where no privacy
can possibly exist, in so far as simplicity means only
a shrewd regard for essentials, a rigid exclusion of whatever
can be done without. Perhaps no white race is nearer
a state of nature than these highlanders of ours. Yet
this relates only to the externals of life. Diogenes sat

(18:22):
in a tub, but his thoughts were deep as the sea.
And whoever estimates our mountaineers as a shallow minded or
open minded people has much to learn. When long John asks,
what are you aiming to do? Up here? How much
money do you make? Where's you, old woman? He does
not really expect sincereer answers, certainly he will take them

(18:45):
with more than a grain of salt. Conversation with him
is a game in quizing you. The interest that he
is actually curious about lie hidden in the back of
his head, and he will proceed toward them by cunning circumventions,
seeking to entrap you into telling the truth by accident.
Being himself born to intrigue and skilled in dodging the

(19:06):
leading question, he assumes you have had equal advantages when
you discuss with him any business of serious concern. If
you should go straight to the point and open your mind, frankly,
he would be nonplussed. The fact is that our highlanders
are sly suspicious and secret of folk. That too, is

(19:27):
a state of nature Primitive societies by no means a
utopia or a garden of Eden. In wilderness life, the
feral arts of concealment, spying false leads, and doubling on
trails are the art self preservative. The native backwardsmen practices
them as instinctively and with as little compunction upon his

(19:50):
own species as upon the deer and the wolf. From
whom he learned them as a friend. No one will
spring quicker to your aid, reckless of consequences, and fight
with you to the last ditch. But fear of betrayal
lies at the very bottom of his nature. His sleepless
suspicion of ulterior motives is no more no less than

(20:11):
a feral trait inherited from a long line of forebears,
whose isolated lies were preserved only by incessant vigilance against
enemies that stalk by night and struck without warning. Casual
visitors learn nothing about the true character of the mountaineers.
I am not speaking of personal but of race, character type.

(20:35):
No outsider can discern and measure those powerful but obscure motives,
those rooted prejudices that constitute their real difference from other
men until they has lived with the people a long
time on terms of intimacy. Nor can any one be
trusted to portray them if he holds a brief either
for or against this people. The fluttering tourist marks only

(20:58):
the oddity he sees, without knowing the reason for them.
On the other hand, a misguided champion flies to arms
at first mention of an unpleasant fact and either denies it,
clamoring for legal proof, or tries to befog the whole
subject and run it on the rocks of altercation. The
mountaineers are high strung and sensitive to criticism. No one

(21:21):
has less use for that worse scourge of avenging heaven
the candid friend of late years. They are growing conscious
of their own belatedness, and that touches a tender spot.
It don't take a big seed to hurt a sore tooth,
since they do not see how anyone can find beauty

(21:42):
or historic interest in ways of life that the rest
of the world has cast aside. So they resent every
exposure of their peculiarities as if that were holding them
up to ridicule or blame. Strange to say it provokes
them to be called mountaineers, that being a foreign word,
which they take as a term of reproach. They call

(22:04):
themselves mountain people or citizens, sometimes humorously mountain boomers, the
word boomer being their name for a common red squirrel,
which is found here only in the upper zones of
the mountains. Backwoodsmen is another term that they deem approprious
among themselves. The backwards are called the Styx Hillsmen, and

(22:26):
Highland or are strange words to them, and anything that
is strange is suspicious. Hence it is next to them
possible for anyone to write much about these people without
offending them or else falling into a sing song repetition
of the same old terms. I have found it beyond
me to convince anyone here that my studies of the

(22:47):
Mountain dialect are made from any better motive than vulgar curiosity.
It has been my habit to jot down on the
spot every dialectical word or variant or idiom that I hear,
along with the phrase or sentence in which it occurred,
For I never trust memory in such matters. And although
I tell frankly what I am about and why, yet

(23:10):
all that the folks can or will say is that
a Chield's among you taken notes and faith he'll print them.
Nothing worse than our looks has yet to be fallen me.
But other scribes have not got off so easy. On
more than one occasion, newspaper men who went into eastern

(23:31):
Kentucky to report feuds were escorted forcibly to the railroad
and warned never to return. The feudists are scarce to
blame for the average news story of their wars is
neither sacred nor profane history. It is bad enough to
be shown up as an assassin, But when one is
posed as cocking the trigger of a gun or shooting

(23:54):
a forty four bullet from a thirty caliber automatic revolver,
who in Kentucky could be expected to stand it. The
novelists have their troubles too. President Frost relates that when
John Fox gave a reading from his Cumberland Tales at
Berea College, the mountain boys were ready to mob him.

(24:15):
They had no comprehension of the nature of fiction. Mister
Fox's stories were either true or false. If they were true,
then he was no gentleman for telling all the family
affairs of people who had entertained him with their best.
If they were not true, then of course they were
libelous upon the mountain people. Such an attitude may remind

(24:38):
us of the general condemnation of fiction by the Uncle
Good a generation ago. As for settlement workers, let them
teach more by example than by precept. Bishop Wilson has
given them some advice that cannot be bettered. It must
be said, with emphasis that our problem is an exceedingly

(24:59):
deal on. The Highlanders are Scotch Irish in their high
spiritedness and proud independence. Those who would help them must
do so in a perfectly frank and kindly way, showing
always genuine interest in them, but never a trace of
patronizing condescension. As quick as a flash, amountaineer will recognize

(25:20):
and resent the intrusion of any such spirit, and will
refuse even what he sorely needs, if he detects in
the accents or the demeanor of the giver, any indication
of an air of superiority the worker among the mountaineers,
he continues, must meet with them on the level and
part on the square, and conquer their oftentimes unreasonable suspicion

(25:45):
by genuine brotherly friendship. The less he has to say
about the superiority of other sections or of the deficiencies
of the mountains, the better for his cause. The fact
is that comparatively few workers are at first able to
pass muster in this regard under the searching and silent
scrutiny of the mountain people. Allow me to add that

(26:07):
this is no place for the uncle good to exercise
their talents, but rather for those who studies and travels
have taught them both tolerance and hopefulness. Some well meaning
missionaries are shocked and scandalized at what seems to them
incurable perversity and race degeneration. It is nothing of the sort.

(26:29):
There are reasons, good reasons for the worst that we
find in any health for certain or loafer's glory, All
that is the inevitable result of isolation and lack of opportunity.
It is no more hopeless than the same features of
life were in the Scotch Highlands two centuries ago. But

(26:49):
it must be known that the future of this really
fine race is at bottom and economic problem which must
be studied hand in hand with the educational one. Civilization
only repels the mountaineer until you show him something to
gain by it. He knows by instinct what he is
bound to lose. There is no use in teaching cleanliness

(27:11):
and thrift to serfs or outcasts. The independence of the
mountain farm must be preserved, or the fine spirit of
the race will vanish, and all that is manly in
the Highlander will wither to the core. It is far
from my own purpose to preach or advise portray the struggle,

(27:31):
and you need write no tract. Still farther is it
from my thought to let characterizations degenerate into caricature. Wherever
I tell anything that is unusual or below the average
of backwoods life, I give fair warning that it is
admitted only for spice or contrast, and let it go
at that. But even in writing with severe restraint, it

(27:55):
will be necessary at times to show conditions so rude
and antiquated that perfer professional apologists will growl, and many
others will find my statements hard to credit as typical
of anything at all in our modern America. So let
me remind the reader again that full three fourths of
our mountaineers still live in the eighteenth century, and that

(28:17):
in their far flung wilderness, away from large rivers and railways,
the habits, customs, morals of the people have changed but
little from those of our old colonial frontier. In essentials,
they are closely analogous to what we read of lower
class English and Scottish life in Covenanter and Jacobite times.

(28:41):
End of section nine, read by Bry's cries Ohio